I’m back, but busy at work today, so this may be disjointed.
In terms of expecting, both are fairly invasive experiences, but one is physically very invasive (pregnancy) where the other has a social worker evaluating your life (do you have good relationships with your parents? What religion are you? How clean is your house?). Both are mindwracking and stressful in different ways. Adopting does have some benefits - you can turn down a child if they have special needs, for instance - with birth you take what you get. Pregnancy is physically stressful for a lot of people. There is something really amazing about creating a life though - its the ultimate in “hey, look what I made!”
Delivery was way easier with adoption.
Post delivery. Bonding is a sore point for me (sorry). I had PPD with my daughter, that really isn’t conducive to the whole “auto bonding” that is supposed to be so magical. I also didn’t sleep. My water broke at 1am after a fairly restless “sleep” - I gave birth at 1pm, I didn’t sleep more than two hours at a time until I was home from the hospital. On the other hand, whatever parent child bond that happens automagically happened when my son opened his eyes and smiled at us at the airport. (He was delivered to us, we first saw him at the airport).
The whole pre-natal bonding thing. Pregnancy can be a pain in the ass (literally, she’s eleven years old and I still have hemorrhoids). It can also be wonderful. It isn’t at all uncommon or unnatural to have some very mixed feelings about the “wonder of pregnancy.” Add in a difficult labor and delivery and postpartum depression and you can lose that whole “magical” side of this. I’m not saying that magical instant bond never happens, but if you are dependent on it happening in order to create a parent-child bond - that’s a problem. And for Dads, it isn’t a guarantee either. It isn’t unheard of for Dad to be resentful of losing his wife to a pregnancy (plus labor, delivery, breastfeeding, and baby). Dad isn’t getting that influx of hormones from birth, he’s got to bond on his own regardless of how baby arrives. You don’t get to put your hand on your wife’s tummy to feel hiccups when you adopt - we did however, get a picture of a 3 month old baby in a little blue sleeper to bond with before arrival.
Here is the difference for us. You do have a genetic tie to your child. She has my nose. She has her dad’s intellectual gifts. She loves to read like my husband and I. She is a natural born geek. My adopted son doesn’t have those ties back to us. But she also reflects back at us all those things we dislike in ourselves - she daydreams like I do and can’t stay focused. She is stubborn like her dad. That genetic tie isn’t 100% gift - there is definitely an element to “you remind me so much of your damn father when you do that!” That isn’t there with my son. He is musical (where did that come from!) and organized (no one else is!) and athletic (everyone else in the house is jealous). His gifts - and his challenges (he doesn’t like to read, what a strange person) - belong to him alone. They don’t carry baggage. And, at the same time, we do take credit for his gifts that reflect back on us. His sense of humor he shares with my Dad.
I do love my kids differently - because they are different children. But that has nothing to do with how they arrived - it has to do with them being individuals.
Bonding is not automatic no matter how you have kids - on your side or theirs. Attachment disorder is more common with adopted kids - particular when they are adopted past about a year or so and spent a lot of time institutionalized - but even then, the vast majority of adopted kids do fine and attachment disorder isn’t unknown in kids raised in their bio families. When we adopted (and this seems to be common) the agency worked with us so we could reduce potential risk. You get a lot more “professional support” adopting than you will get giving birth (but you’ll get plenty of “non-professional busy body advice” no matter what you do.) Also, parenting your kids and creating a relationship with your kids (my son is in middle school this year, and this is being driven home) - is a lifelong task - not something that happens in a moment in a hospital room.
To address sandra_nz’s point. My parents have three bio kids. My baby sister went through rehab and as part of the process, we had to go through a week of intensive family therapy. She’s never felt “part of the family.” She was the tail end child, she always thought she was a “mistake” (she wasn’t, although I think only the second was planned, I arrived seven months after my parents wedding). She sees herself as a different person than our family - and in a lot of ways she is. She has more in common with my father’s mother (who didn’t get along with my own mother) than with “us.” She’s athletic, none of us ever were - I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad watch a sport that isn’t golf. She’s an extrovert. My dad is - but the rest of us are introverts. She’s emotionally intense and shares it - the rest of us follow the German “bottle up your feelings” model with a dose of pragmatism. And we are a strange family…none of us really share interests. We are close, but not tight. She fixated on the differences between herself and the rest and felt left out. Now almost three years sober, I think she’s realized that she was projecting a lot. But being a bio child does not grant a ticket to “feeling like you belong.”